Conscious activity to control human fertility is as intrinsic to the social being of human groups as the activity to control and organize the production of food. What changes over time and from one social context to another is who controls fertility, under what conditions, through what means, and for what purposes. The techniques of fertility control change less than the value bestowed on children and the social conditions and consciousness of the women who bear them. These changes concern the cultural symbolism and social relations of fertility control, suggesting that, as with the economic distribution of goods, control over fertility is a matter not only of technology but of the total arrangement of power in society.
A basic proposition of this book is that gender divisions and the position of women in society have a direct and specific influence on fertility control practices and therefore on birthrates. How, when, and whether to have a child involve different issues for women than for men; yet they do so in ways that vary depending on a woman’s class, age, and occupation, as well as the time and culture in which she lives. Because gender and class relations are negotiated through political struggles (struggles for power and control), fertility becomes an area of conflict and negotiation, between women and men and between different social classes. Fertility control is not, then, simply a private strategy of individuals or families to help them cope with economic or other pressures. It occurs within definite social contexts and sexual power relations that women individually and collectively try to accommodate and sometimes resist.
We need to distinguish between fertility control as it has been practiced in all cultures by individuals, particularly women, and as it has been practiced recurrently by male-dominated ruling elites. This distinction is often expressed as the difference between "birth control," or control by individuals over their own childbearing, and "population control," or control by authorities or elites over population size and composition.1
But the concept of population control is too simplified and too "’gender neutral" to encompass the multiple and crisscrossing grounds through which public authorities or "centers of power" historically have sought to channel biological reproduction. At the least, these include not only population control but control over the sexuality and physical health of women, the terms and conditions of motherhood, and the structure of the family.
Public, organized strategies of fertility control—the subject of Chapter 2—do not emerge in a vacuum; they are responses to popular practices and changing ideologies about fertility, which are the subject of this chapter. Whatever the dominant norms, women persist in trying to calibrate fertility to their own life rhythms and needs. A classic historical survey of contraception concluded that "the human race has in all ages and in all geographical locations desired to control its own fertility; that while women have always wanted babies, they have wanted them when they wanted them. And they have wanted neither too few nor too many."2 But women’s changing wants in regard to fertility, and the demands of "the race," as represented by male rulers, churchmen and moralists, chiefs of clans or households, and medical and population authorities, have often diverged. Fertility rates are the negotiated outcomes of struggles, whether overtly political or waged surreptitiously and "underground," between these sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting sets of interests.
The remarkable thing is not that those in power have attempted to control population by controlling the fertility of women but that they have been so unsuccessful. They continually run up against the everyday practices of ordinary women, in having or not having children according to their own sense of their needs.3 Toward this end, abortion has been the means to which women have resorted with greatest persistence over time.
State, church, and medical strategies to regulate fertility in industrial societies, including those that would restrict or suppress abortion, have an impact on women’s ability to control their fertility, but it is partial and reactive rather than absolute. Such strategies are part of a range of limiting conditions that include social and economic forces that those in power do not always direct or plan. More than anything else, changes in fertility and abortion rates represent women’s own responses to conditions they as individuals did not create but against which their collective practices, such as illegal or clandestine abortion and birth control, become strategies of survival and resistance. Indeed, more than the suppression of abortion, its endurance on a large scale, through diverse historical contexts, tells us something important about women’s specific relation to fertility and the terms and conditions of fertility control and reproductive freedom for them.
The point here is not to romanticize women’s fertility behavior as "liberating" or morally defensible in itself, or to collapse all cultural and historical situations into modern concepts of birth control. The late feminist anthropologist Michele Rosaldo warned against the tendency in feminist theory to mystify premodern women "as the bearer of primordial human need," "the image of ourselves undressed," thus erasing "the historical specificity of their lives and of our own." "There is something wrong—indeed, morally disturbing—in an argument which claims that the practitioners of infanticide in the past are ultimately our predecessors in an endless and essentially unchanging fight to keep men from making claims to female bodies."4 A precise social analysis requires that we pay attention to the specific conditions of history, culture, and locale that give any act of fertility control its meaning. Women make the "choice" to get or induce an abortion under an enormous range of conditions, some of which are oppressive, desperate, or even dehumanized. But in most cases they do so consciously, as active agents of their fertility and not merely victims of their biology or pawns of "natural" forces like population movements. If we are going to understand changes in fertility, we have to look at women, the conditions in which they live, and their own consciousness.